Interesting dialogue here. I would like to join and add my point of view.
I've worked with young people, school drop-outs who have left their parents' homes and gone under the protection of the state institutions. Well, such is a double-edged sword. Pedagogues, who earn their living from their work, would be well advised not to add fuel to the fire and turn children against their parents. Or not let the young people out of their victimhood.
Some pedagogues I've seen so enamoured with their helper syndrome that they enjoy the fact that the young person now prefers them instead of the parents and do everything to confirm the helplessness they have experienced.
The house I worked for has about 25-30 flats where the young people live either alone or in pairs, often from their teens up to 21 years old. The rent and living costs are one hundred per cent financed by the state; these are immense budgets that are spent annually on housing the young people.
The young people are usually in therapy for many years and have perfected psychologist-speak. They manage to pull themselves out of all the demands made on them and see themselves as outcasts and misfits who are bullied because of this or that identity.
They are themselves permanently in love with their existence as outcasts and I have heard from them more than once that there is no way they will or want to attend a regular school. Insofar as they feel pressure to participate in any measures devised for them, they manage to boycott them successfully. All this then drags on until they complete the so-called youth welfare, at 21, when all funding finally ends.
The inability of these pedagogues to reintegrate the young people into the parental home and school life has to do with their attitude that these parental homes and schools are not a suitable place per se and instead of the young people familiarising themselves with the realities of life, they continue to be channelled through the system until they are too old at some point. What disturbed me the most was that young people were persuaded that they were fighting against a world that ignored their problems and left them to their own devices. Of course, the heroes of youth welfare come in handy. Teachers make it easy for themselves not to deal with their own lack of confidence in the classroom.
Young people who don't quite fit in are spotted early on, and the teachers in turn draw the attention of the youth welfare offices early on to so-called learning disorders and maladjusted behaviour. Parents are persuaded that they have disturbed children or are disturbed themselves and insofar as they do not resist interventions in their family life but accept that both they and their children need educational or psychological help, they become part of this complex system.
Where economic interests are mixed with psychological and social ones. The fact is that the social institutions are not really interested in downsizing or, for example, showing a high success rate. On the contrary, it is quite respected among the helpers to expand their sphere of influence even further and to attract new funds.
This sphere, small as it is in fact, is an expression of a much larger system of helpers, be it hospitals as big as a village, doctors' practices, cosmetic surgery and so on. A society in which the systems of helpers have grown immensely needs a mass influx of clients, patients = helpless people who voluntarily feed into the system. Every minority, no matter how insignificant, grows mentally into a movement in which the individual feels helpless. Nevertheless, I would say the whole thing is a birth of affluence.
I think we are dealing with an "everybody wants to help everybody" mentality in which ultimately independence from help is not only not achieved, but is economically unattractive.
I agree with you where you say that the constant discussion around such basically rather marginal issues of life only fuel them with more energy. The mass market demands masses of helpless and sick people. Where you look for them, you find them. It is a self-feeding system where the good approach of "helping people to help themselves" is merely lip service, not lived reality.
In my view, parties and oppositions have long since become a media theatre, an equally self-perpetuating sphere, detached from the realities of the "common man". Whereby I ask myself whether the common man, for his part, still exists at all and whether the so-called Western world does not already have an oversupply of theorists and media workers who far exceed the number of craftsmen, farmers and those working in the real field.
This may all sound very negative and I can also take a rather humorous attitude to it, but that would make this already long comment even longer.